The Sam Langford nursery rhyme

Monstrous puncher!

 

I'd be interested if Clay Moyle had found anything during his Langford research to indicate that Sam was keeping a wide berth from Dillon.

 

According to this, Dillon was after Langford (if he could make 158 lbs).

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=thUbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=3EgEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4462,6936198


Being as Sam was the Colored HW champ at that point 158 seems unlikely.

 

Read this article about Jack Dillon challenging Sam Langford to a bout provided Sam would come in at middleweight poundage. I feel vindicated
now as I read a similar bit of information in an old Ring Mag,that did not specify Langford having to make weight for a match with Jack Dillon,but the opinion by the writer to the effect Sam Langford was not anxious to meet Dillon. The time period would probably have been 1911-12,when Jack Dillon was 21-2 years old,and still improving. It should be also noted that the bigger Langford weighed 166 pounds in a 1910 bout with Jim Barry, and
in Dec. 1911 weighed 170 pounds against Sam McVey. So there may be some validity to the fact that Langford wished not to meet Dillon at a 160-5 compromise ? The 28 year old Langford in 1911 was in his prime,and Jack Dillon at 20 years old was coming into his own soon. At middleweight weights or about, that would have been a titanic battle , methinks...
compromise

 

"I'd be interested if Clay Moyle had found anything during his Langford research to indicate that Sam was keeping a wide berth from Dillon."

I didn't, but I can envision a scneario where he wouldn't have wanted to have to try and drop weight to get down to a designated weight that someone like Dillon would have asked him to make. That doesn't seem at all beyond the realm of possibility to me. I just have a hard time imagining him to be afraid of fighting Dillon. But, sure if he was asked to do so at a weight he'd have a difficult time making, I could imagine him not being very anxious to do that.

 

Maybe he learned a lesson from the Lavigne-Walcott fight a decade earlier, eh?